Electronic devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's) often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs, to introduce new features, or both.
Electronic devices, such as mobile handsets, access servers to retrieve update packages that are needed to update firmware and/or software. When thousands of mobile handsets simultaneously attempt to access the servers, some of them may not be able to get connected. There is a need for wireless networks to determine if individual mobile handsets can be updated. There is a need for wireless networks to facilitate downloading of update packages by mobile handsets.
Creating efficient and compact update packages for firmware/software updates is a big challenge. Managing update packages efficiently in a carrier network is also a great challenge. Managing the lifecycle of firmware and software in electronic devices, such as mobile handsets, is a complicated and important task. Prior art updating of software and firmware entailed merely overwriting the entirety of an older existing version of software with an entirety of a newer or different version of software. The prior art process requires extensive memory resources and consumes valuable time.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.